Desperate! Vista Partition, XP Installation Problem

[calliemoonbeam]

Hi, I asked about how to partition Vista to install XP this last month and got some good answers and a good tutorial. I've since found several other tutorials along the same line. I had to order the XP and wait for it to come in the mail, so I've just been trying to do this in the past few days.

I didn't have any trouble with the tutorials or partitioning the hard drive. But now I'm ready to install XP and when I go into setup, it doesn't recognize the partition I created and only shows the C: drive where Vista is. The partition has been formatted and assigned a letter, but no one can seem to tell me what the problem is or how to fix it. There's also another partition on there, where my recovery data is, and the XP setup doesn't recognize that partition either.

XP setup asks if I want to create a partition there, and I thought okay maybe I can just create it here instead, but it says type C and absolutely nothing happens when I do that. It won't let me do anything except install on the C: drive, which I know I don't want to do because that's where Vista is.

Any ideas...anyone? I feel like I'm beating my head against a brick wall, and I'm losing jobs by the day because I can't get this going. The sad thing is I'm not even having trouble with my Vista, which I guess is a miracle in itself, lol, but in my business not many people want to use Vista, but just enough that I have to keep it too. Otherwise, I'd just wipe Vista and use only XP. If anyone can help a quickly turning psycho lady, please do! Thanks!

[MELOC]

well, this won't help your current situation, but i wonder if it would work to install a second hard drive and load xp onto it. you could change the drive that you boot to in the BIOS boot up sequence upon each start.

[calliemoonbeam]

Thanks Meloc. Will that really work? I'll check into it. Wonder why none of the half a dozen techies I've talked to have mentioned this??

[MELOC]

because it would be a pain to enter the bios everytime you needed to start the computer. maybe another option would be to use a removable hard drive enclosure and physically swap hard drives depending on which OS you want to run.

[OntarioMan]

I missed your original message.

You already have a machine with Vista loaded - and you want to install Windows XP on the same machine and dual boot?

My opinion : probably not worth the hassle - not when you can buy an off-lease late model system with XP pro already loaded for less than what you pay for XP - and simply use a KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) switch.

The KVM switch allows you to run many computers off of one keyboard-monitor-mouse - and switch between them. A "2 port KVM" would allow you to run 2 computers, a 4-port = 4 computers, etc. Both your Vista machine and your XP machine would be running, and you could almost instantly switch between the two - very handy!

Again, I missed you're original message - so I'm not entirely sure why you want to do this - what exactly you're trying to accomplish.

Originally Posted by calliemoonbeam

Hi, I asked about how to partition Vista to install XP this last month and got some good answers and a good tutorial. I've since found several other tutorials along the same line. I had to order the XP and wait for it to come in the mail, so I've just been trying to do this in the past few days.

I didn't have any trouble with the tutorials or partitioning the hard drive. But now I'm ready to install XP and when I go into setup, it doesn't recognize the partition I created and only shows the C: drive where Vista is. The partition has been formatted and assigned a letter, but no one can seem to tell me what the problem is or how to fix it. There's also another partition on there, where my recovery data is, and the XP setup doesn't recognize that partition either.

XP setup asks if I want to create a partition there, and I thought okay maybe I can just create it here instead, but it says type C and absolutely nothing happens when I do that. It won't let me do anything except install on the C: drive, which I know I don't want to do because that's where Vista is.

Any ideas...anyone? I feel like I'm beating my head against a brick wall, and I'm losing jobs by the day because I can't get this going. The sad thing is I'm not even having trouble with my Vista, which I guess is a miracle in itself, lol, but in my business not many people want to use Vista, but just enough that I have to keep it too. Otherwise, I'd just wipe Vista and use only XP. If anyone can help a quickly turning psycho lady, please do! Thanks!

[calliemoonbeam]

Thanks OntarioMan. I bought the new computer with Vista, which I need for some jobs I do, but I also need XP for some others, especially a really good, long-term job I could have had if I could have gotten this going. However, I needed to be ready to go by tomorrow morning, and I've given up! Oh my gosh, what a nightmare!

Thanks anyway for your help!

[Kung]

Originally Posted by calliemoonbeam

Hi, I asked about how to partition Vista to install XP this last month and got some good answers and a good tutorial. I've since found several other tutorials along the same line. I had to order the XP and wait for it to come in the mail, so I've just been trying to do this in the past few days.

Ok, first question/suggestion - can you let us know specifically WHICH tutorial you went with? There are loads of them out there. I normally go with this one:

http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/about88231.html

I didn't have any trouble with the tutorials or partitioning the hard drive. But now I'm ready to install XP and when I go into setup, it doesn't recognize the partition I created and only shows the C: drive where Vista is. The partition has been formatted and assigned a letter, but no one can seem to tell me what the problem is or how to fix it. There's also another partition on there, where my recovery data is, and the XP setup doesn't recognize that partition either.

XP setup asks if I want to create a partition there, and I thought okay maybe I can just create it here instead, but it says type C and absolutely nothing happens when I do that. It won't let me do anything except install on the C: drive, which I know I don't want to do because that's where Vista is.

Any ideas...anyone? I feel like I'm beating my head against a brick wall, and I'm losing jobs by the day because I can't get this going. The sad thing is I'm not even having trouble with my Vista, which I guess is a miracle in itself, lol, but in my business not many people want to use Vista, but just enough that I have to keep it too. Otherwise, I'd just wipe Vista and use only XP. If anyone can help a quickly turning psycho lady, please do! Thanks!

When you created the new partition in Vista, what format did you choose? NTFS? FAT?

In all honesty I have to admit that I'm confused because it *IS* so easy to do. There's not much to do:

1. Create new partition by resizing the existing partition (in Vista)
2. Format new partition (I recommend NTFS)
3. Reboot a few times.
4. Install XP on new partition.
5. Set up boot loader.

I'd check out the above link if you haven't. XP was pretty easy to dual boot - all one had to do was edit the boot.ini file once installed. With Vista you either have to mess with the bcdedit.exe file, or use something like VistaBootPRO.

[calliemoonbeam]

Hi Kung, thanks for your reply. Sit back, this is a doozy, lol. Yes, I used that one, I think you posted it for me last month. I looked at several, and they were pretty much the same, but yours seemed the easiest and most straightforward. But for every one person that it went smoothly for, it seems like there are a thousand who had problems for one reason or another. I did format it with NTFS, that's what was recommended, and actually when I went to do it that's the only choice it gave me.

Everything went smoothly with creating the partition, and I thought that would be the hard part, or maybe recreating the reboot steps for Vista. But when I got to the Install XP part the XP setup wouldn't recognize my partition. I looked around on the internet (for hours and hours) and finally found another guy with the same problem. He said it was because XP was so old it didn't recognize really big hard drives. His was 250 GB and mine's 300. He said XP would only read about 150 GB and then stop because it thinks that's all there is.

He said I needed to "slipsteam" SP2 in with the XP disk and then load it and it would recognize it and gave me a link to a tutorial for slipstreaming. I understood all the directions, but something went berserk when I extracted the i386 files. My computer got totally messed up and I couldn't delete the files (said I didn't have permission even though I'm the administrator?).

So I tried to do a system restore to get it back to a better point and start again and then found out System Restore doesn't work (apparently a common problem with Vista). I've just spent the past 10 hours searching the internet and talking to techies for solutions.

I do finally have the problem files gone, the partition deleted and my c: drive back to full size and everything pretty much back to where I started before all this mess, whew!

Someone else had mentioned that I could buy an external hard drive, load XP on it and do something to the BIOS when I boot. What do you think of that idea, and can you tell me exactly what to do and how to do it to the BIOS so I could boot either to Vista or XP? Or do you have any other suggestions? I just don't think I have the strength to go through all that again (and not much hair left either, lol), and I'm afraid I'd still run into the same problem with the i386 files and don't see any way around that part.

I probably sound like a moron and maybe I am, but I found hundreds and hundreds of other people who had the same problem. None of the techies could even figure out my partition problem, it was just another moron like me, lol. I used to think I was pretty good with computers before all this mess, now not so much.

P.S. Someone else said to wipe the drive clean, install XP first and then reinstall Vista with my recovery CDs. But how do I know I won't have the same issue when I try to reinstall Vista? And someone else said that might not work because my XP is a DSP set and not OEM, that there might be some conflict, and XP is Pro and Vista is Home. I did notice the SP2 files don't have the same names on the disk that came with my XP as they were calling them in the tutorial. Thanks so much if you stuck with me this far!

[Stann]

Hard drive size limitations are motherboard and bios related and not XP related. Remember, XP was derived from NT and was designed to support large scale operations. I'm pretty certain that XP doesn't have a disk size limitation at around 300GB.

There was always hard drive size/compatibility problems, between motherboards and hard drives, arising as disk sizes got larger. There were problems at the 2 GB size, the 8 GB size, the 137 GB size. The problems were all related to address ranges (ATA style disks). Do a google on "hard drive size barriers" for more info. Here's Western Digital's URL on it http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc....ted=1031763968

Suggestion, if the motherboard is not recognizing the larger disk size (and it only sees it as a small size) see if it has a new bios update. If not, then you can just use the disk with it's smaller size (ie.) which would be the max size that it can use that disk( so, it may only indicate or see 137GB on the disk) . So, that'll entail reintalling both O/S. But, I don't know if it'll work with your particular install disks, though. HTH some, Good luck.

[Gary in ohio]

why not just load vmserver and run XP as a task under vista. vmserver is free.

[calliemoonbeam]

Thanks guys, but I cry uncle. I'm just going to take it in and pay Geek Rescue to do it for me, lol. I've already lost the great job I wanted, so there's no rush any more. I really appreciate everyone's help so much!